World's oldest ALPHABET is discovered: Ancient 4,400-year-old text is found on clay cylinders from a tomb in Syria - and it upends everything we thought we knew about the origin of writing

Daily mail ^ | 21 November 2024 | JONATHAN CHADWICK

[george76]

For decades, it's been a common belief that the Ancient Egyptians were responsible for the very first alphabet.

Now, a shocking finding challenges this assumption, pushing back the age of the first known alphabetic writing by about 500 years.

...

The finger-length cylinders were found at Tell Umm-el Marra, a former city located in today's northwestern Syria, once a bustling crossroads for two trade routes.

Carbon dating techniques reveal that the objects date back 4,400 years to 2400 BC – preceding any other known alphabetic scripts by roughly 500 years.

...

However, the academic admits he 'can only speculate' exactly what the writing says.

...

Before the alphabet, humans relied on hieroglyphics, according to Professor Schwartz, who found the cylinders in 2004.

'Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated,' he said.

'This new discovery shows people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined.'

With colleagues from the University of Amsterdam, the professor co-directed a 16-year-long archaeological dig at Tell Umm-el Marra, one of the ancient Near East's oldest cities, located on a crossroads of two trade routes.

At Umm-el Marra, the archaeologists uncovered tombs dating back to the Early Bronze Age – a period stretching from about 3500 to 2000 BC.

One of the best-preserved tombs contained six skeletons, gold and silver jewelry, cookware, a spearhead and intact pottery vessels.

Next to the pottery was four of the 'lightly baked' clay cylinders or tubes with what seemed to be alphabetic writing on top.

Now, the researchers have used carbon-14 dating, a scientific method that can accurately determine the age of organic materials as old as 60,000 years.

[bobcat62]

The earliest writings of Xiao Bai Din?

[CardCarryingMember.VastRightWC]

I can easily translate it.
It says:

          "Your chariot's warranty is about to expire"

[nagant]

“Before the alphabet, humans relied on hieroglyphics, according to Professor Schwartz, who found the cylinders in 2004.”

Hieroglyphics are just pictorial representations of words, essentially what the Chinese written languages are today. This prof is trying to milk a career out of a minor discovery.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks for the ping!

[snip] Carbon dating techniques reveal that the objects date back 4,400 years to 2400 BC – preceding any other known alphabetic scripts by roughly 500 years... At Umm-el Marra, the archaeologists uncovered tombs dating back to the Early Bronze Age – a period stretching from about 3500 to 2000 BC. One of the best-preserved tombs contained six skeletons, gold and silver jewelry, cookware, a spearhead and intact pottery vessels. Next to the pottery was four of the 'lightly baked' clay cylinders or tubes with what seemed to be alphabetic writing on top. [/snip]

[Claud]

Heheh. Syriac, no, not exactly...but it’d make sense if the language of Adam and Eve was proto-Semitic or proto-Afro-Asiatic, which only fractured later into Akkadian, Northwest Semitic, et al.

Proto-Afro-Asiatic is widely believed to be the oldest known language family at about 8000-13000 B.C.

[Windcatcher]

Me too. Deciphering Linear A would fill in an important hole in our history.

[Claud]

Written Egyptian is more complicated than that. Yes, there were pictographs, but there were also one-sound-one-letter correspondences, particularly with names and some grammatical forms. That’s how Champollion figured out how to read it...names in Greek were transliterated nearly letter-by-letter with Egyptian hieroglyphs in the cartouches.

And actually, there are very early inscriptions called “proto-Siniatic” that used the Egyptian values almost like an alphabet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script

[Claud]

Me too. Deciphering Linear A would fill in an important hole in our history.

My 15-year-old daughter wants to be the one to do it! :D

[Openurmind]

““Before the alphabet, humans relied on hieroglyphics, according to Professor Schwartz, who found the cylinders.”

Two things. For some reason he is excluding the very well and acknowledged as earlier Mesopotamian Cuneiform that was dated before this.

While the Harappan Script before that was hieroglyphic, Cuneiform has a distinct alphabet.

I am trying to figure our why hieroglyphics are so persecuted as a written language. All they are is a whole premise or story equal to text compressed into a one symbol file. It is a zip file that dumps a whole bunch of data into the mind at a rate text cannot.

Yet we use alphabets and first written languages to judge intelligence. We do this for our computers now with barcodes, and we have a faster mind than it does. Hieroglyphics are faster to read compared to text. When you are educated how.

Not everyone throughout history was allowed to learn to read text. But where there are hieroglyphics they are plastered all over in public to read. This means, that most everyone could read. A sign of lower intelligence and overall education? It is the exact opposite...

[SunkenCiv]

Ebla, ancient city 33 miles (53 km) southwest of Aleppo in northwestern Syria. During the height of its power (c. 2600–2240 bce), Ebla dominated northern Syria, Lebanon, and parts of northern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and enjoyed trade and diplomatic relations with states as far away as Egypt, Iran, and Sumer... In 1975 Matthiae's team found Ebla's archives, dating to the 3rd millennium bce. Discovered virtually intact in the order in which they had once been stored on their now-collapsed shelves were more than 17,000 clay cuneiform tablets and fragments, offering a rich source of information about Ebla... Beyond, Ebla controlled a group of 17 city-states, probably in what is now Lebanon and southeastern Turkey, areas rich in silver and timber. The city proper was a manufacturing and distribution centre. Linen and wool, including damask cloth, were the main products. Metalworking, including the smelting and alloying of gold, silver, copper, tin, and lead, was the second most important activity. Woodworking and the production of olive oil, wine, and beer also were important... imports included gold, silver, copper, tin, precious stones, and sheep... Diplomacy and limited warfare supported Ebla's commercial activities. Emar, a city strategically located at the confluence of the Euphrates and Galikh rivers, was tied to Ebla by dynastic marriage. Khammazi was Ebla's commercial and diplomatic ally in Iran. Commercial treaties were drawn up with other cities. Mari, on the Euphrates River to the southeast, was Ebla's great commercial rival. Twice, an Eblaite army marched against it, and for a time Ebla ruled Mari through a military governor... Although Sargon of Akkad's claim to have conquered Ebla was cast in doubt by the discoveries in the excavations, the fire that destroyed the city was probably the result of an attack by Sargon's grandson Naram-Sin (c. 2240 bce). There followed a 250-year period of impoverishment, after which an Amorite group sacked Ebla and established its own dynasty. The Amorites rebuilt the palace and a temple, and a statue representing one of their kings was excavated in the ruins. Only limited prosperity returned to the city, and a decorated bone sceptre of the Egyptian king Ḥtp-ib-Re (reigned c. 1750 bce) indicates renewed relations with Egypt.

Ebla | Encyclopaedia Brittanica | Amy Tikkanen

[Governor Dinwiddie]

That's one of those things that makes me wonder if a supercomputer running AI could at least crack a little bit in Linaear A.

Humans are pretty smart. Crack just a tad of Linear A, and humans would be off to the races.

[SunkenCiv]

Ebla (Inner Syria), ceremonial mace

This pharaoh is also known by a ceremonial mace found inside the so-called “Tomb of the Lord of the Goats” in Ebla, in modern northern Syria; the mace was a gift from Hotepibre to the Eblaite king Immeya who was his contemporary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotepibre#Levant

[newfreep]

Hieroglyphics...the first form of emojis

[Openurmind]

“Hieroglyphics...the first form of emojis”

Good reference... Yep.

[TonyinLA]

If a written language is discovered on 4,400 year old artifacts, that proves the written language must have pre-dated the artifact since the language didn’t arise overnight.

How many centuries/generations to develop a written language from spoken? Is it possible written language/alphabet is thousands of years older? Aren’t we getting close to the Ice Age here?

[AZJeep]

We got plaque of pharaoh Menes 3200–3000 BC.
That’s older than this!

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

Bookmark

[Windcatcher]

Mind-blowing. The table makes it plain how many reconstructed names lead directly to corresponding Greek letters and thence to the Latin alphabet.

[Verginius Rufus]

There were a number of scripts invented before the alphabet--in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China. But they were all complicated systems used by a small number of scribes. The alphabet was different in having just a small number of symbols (22 in the Phoenician and Hebrew versions) so literacy could be widespread.

No one knows how to decipher the Harappan script. So we don't even know if they had Ovaltine.

The Bronze Age inhabitants of Greece had at least two writing systems (now called Linear A and Linear B) but they were syllabic systems and probably only a limited number of people knew them. The script on the Phaistos Disk seems to be a different system entirely. There was a syllabic system derived from one of the Bronze Age systems that continued in use in Cyprus much later even when other Greeks had an alphabet.

Linear A and Linear B died out entirely and have no connection to the later Greek alphabet (which was derived from the Phoenician alphabet). Linear B can now be mostly read thanks to Michael Ventris' decipherment in 1952.

[Verginius Rufus]

A long time ago, maybe in the 1970s, there was an article in Scientific American arguing that the early cuneiform characters developed out of various small objects used to symbolize various things in trade (a sheep, a goat, etc.). Traders would wrap a bunch of these items in a clay envelope and make notations on the exterior. Eventually they figured out they didn't need to use the tokens--just marks on a clay tablet would convey the information. This happened over thousands of years. The earliest "writing" in Mesopotamia is quite a bit different from the fully-developed cuneiform characters.